How We Heal
By Rev. J. Mary Luti
February 10, 2008
First Sunday in Lent
Lessons: Genesis 3:1-13, 17-21; Matthew 4:1-11
A young rabbi fresh out of seminary was called on to officiate at a funeral of a man in his congregation he didn’t really know. He made an appointment with the family and drove out to the house, but when he pulled into the driveway, he didn’t get out of the car right away. He felt a little panicky, never having made a visit like this before. What was he supposed to do? Sitting there with the motor still running, he wished he had gone to law school.
A woman came out and knocked on the car window. “Are you coming in?” she wanted to know. He turned the engine off, got out of the car, and walked with her up to the house. Inside, a big family waited for holy words. He shook everybody’s hands, found a seat, and waited for holy words too. Any words would have done just fine. They didn’t even have to be holy. He had no idea what to say.
There is a line somewhere in Scripture that says, “God watches over fools.” He believed this, for suddenly out of his mouth came words that were not his own. He said, "Tell me about your father."
"What would you like to know?" one of the children asked.
"Well," he said, "how did he meet your mother?"
"He had a Packard.” It was the widow who spoke first. “Actually, it was his brother's car, but he borrowed it. I always wanted to ride in a Packard. So he took me for a drive."
"And then what?" asked one of the sons.
"And then you were born a year later.”
Everybody burst out laughing. "Are we allowed to laugh?" one of the grandchildren asked.
After that, there was a flood of stories. How he came to America. How the family business was established. They passed around old pictures. (Looking at a wedding picture, one of the kids exclaimed, "Grandma, you were hot!") The lessons of his life unfolded. His sacrifices. His values. And in those few moments, life defeated death.
We are complex creatures, we human beings. Our tradition puts it this way: we are body and soul. Souls are the seat of wisdom, personality, love, memory, intellect, will and humor. Our animating souls are unique and subtle, mysterious and enduring. But strong as it is, the soul can be damaged, its faculties twisted, its powers distorted. The soul-wound creates pervasive and lasting devastation in the human personality.
Our bodies are beautiful and mysterious too, but they are more easily broken. We are “wonderfully made”, says Psalm 139, yet we are also frighteningly vulnerable. In our bodies we are subject to aging, accident, disease and death. Fragility is our human condition.
The story of Adam and Eve was written to explain how things got to be this way for us. It doesn’t really explain it, of course, for how things got to be this way is a mystery far more ambiguous than even this mythic account of the first disobedience can tell. Nevertheless, the story affirms something we all know—none of us ever gets to the end of our lives without contributing something of our own willful making to the great sea of sorrow and suffering that is humanity’s element. And every time we make our contribution, something breaks. Somewhere a fissure opens, a crack widens, a light dims.
The story also says, simply, that we are creatures, finite and fragile. And because of our finitude and fragility, we suffer. We all suffer and we all die. There is a lot of blame to go around for the devastating consequences of human sin. But for our finitude and fragility, there is no blame. We are, as Psalm 8 says, glorious creations, amazing and wonderful—but we are not God. We were created “a little less” than divine. And for this little less-ness and all it implies, there is only pathos, only the most tender regard. Unto dust we all return. We are vulnerable, weak, contingent. We suffer, we die, we grieve, we hurt and hurt deeply.
This is the truths about us, but if it were the whole truth, we would be entitled to despair. But it is not the whole truth. The whole truth is that we also heal. The body has an amazing ability to mend itself. It does not always succeed in mending itself, but it has that capacity. Our physical resiliency is a marvel, our various recoveries and remissions are the body’s thrilling gifts to us, and we honor ur bodies for taking such good care of themselves, such good care of us.
The spirit heals too. Death and disease, betrayal and tragedy, disappointment and failure—all these common human experiences leave us broken and bereft, smothered in sorrow and rage and bitterness, buried in self-pity and guilt and blame and grief. We can't breathe. There's no relief. But then something miraculous happens. It may take a month, or it may take what seems like forever, but there does come a day, most of the time, when we are able to surrender the rage, the bitterness, the self-pity and the blame. And we heal.
This is one of God's greatest gifts to us—we heal. Life overcomes death. We find a new wholeness, new equilibrium. We grow in wisdom, we gain a deeper appreciation for life, we feel more love for those around us, we have more compassion for the suffering of others. Our whole world was drastically rearranged. We were deposited in a brand new landscape, a scary place we did not know existed and would never have chosen. Yet somehow we have found a way to live in it, to build a new home in it, to discover its hidden gifts, even to be happy.
The rabbi got up to leave. The family thanked him profusely. At the time, he didn't think he had done much of anything. Now a few years and many deaths and funerals later, he understands what he did. He drew them together.
We heal. But the deeper truth is that we heal each other. We can't do much about the vulnerability of the body, the inevitability of disease and death, our human condition. But we can, he reflects, “help the dying leave this world in peace, acceptance and gratitude. We can keep the survivors from falling into the grave. We can bring them home from the cemetery. Home to family and friends and community, to work and play and life and meaning. We can love each other. We have the power, often with the simplest of acts, to help one another heal.”
He drew them together. He made them tell their father’s story. And in telling it, they realized that their father’s story was part of a much bigger story. No matter what ill we may be suffering, no matter the cause or the effects of our hardships, this is the way the greatest healing often comes—in circles of love, friendship, support and care. Healing comes when we are together, holding tightly to the belief that our small stories are connected to bigger stories, that our finite lives are connected to the infinite reality in which we live and move and have our truest existence.
The way we heal in circles of love and friendship—this is one way of thinking about the church. The church is such a circle, a gathering of vulnerable human creatures brought together by mercy, who embrace each other’s fragility with the same healing balm we ourselves once received from God—mercy shown to us in Jesus, mercy poured out in us by the Holy Spirit for sharing with the world.
It is also one way of thinking about the fully human life that Jesus claimed for himself. In our second scripture story today, he tells the Tempter that he wants none of his false, superhuman glory, power, and domination. Jesus wants only to be human, to be a creature under God’s sovereignty and mercy. He chooses vulnerability, he accepts the inevitability of death. And in so doing, he links his story to ours, and ours to his, links the two stories as one, irrevocably. He never chooses to be anywhere but inside our human circle. Inside, among us, with us, he entrusts his finite life to God and God alone.
This is a choice for vulnerability that is, at the very same time, paradoxically, mysteriously, a choice for wholeness, a choice for healing and restoration. The story makes was a quick and easy decision. It sounds like he just waved his hand, and the temptation to be something other than a creature of God, the temptation to escape his fragility and create a false existence based on denying and dominating everyone else’s, simply vanished. But we forget that Jesus’ ordeal took place over forty days and forty nights. There’s a lot in that time that we do not get to see in this brief narration, much that is not described, a struggle that goes on behind a thick veil of silence. But the last line of the story is telling: Jesus was so worn out by his ordeal that when it was finally over, angels had to come and tend to him.
Every time we choose to be human (and we do indeed have to choose this, again and again—it is not a given), each time we decide to be creatures of God dependent on mercy for our lives, whenever we surrender to becoming a part of the human circle, linking our stories to God’s great overarching narrative of mercy and utter compassion—every time we choose to be human, it is the same for us. We suffer from the exertion of it, we have to put up a fight, we have to struggle to resist the allure of false ways of life. We get worn down and worn out saying “no” to isolation and to all manner of evasion. We need the tending of angels. But we can overcome. We can claim our humanity, embrace our dust, refuse the temptations away from solidarity with all who suffer. And when we do, we are being made whole. When we do, we are healing.
Now it is important to acknowledge that some kinds of healing do not ever happen, and that some people never find wholeness and peace. Healing is a mysterious negotiation between grace and human effort. Turning from death to life, embracing wholeness, reconciliation and peace—these things are gifts of God, but they are also demanding human decisions, exhausting human choices; as much projects as miracles. The world is filled with blessings, intimations of eternity, invitations to make meaning. But sometimes we just aren't able to receive them. Sometimes, we just aren't ready to choose them. Sometimes we just don’t know how to. God constantly rains healing on the earth, someone once said, the problem is that not everyone has a bucket.
Sarah Winchester was the wife of the heir to the Winchester Rifle fortune. When her husband and baby died suddenly, she believed that the family was cursed by the spirits of everyone who’d been killed by Winchester Rifles. A medium told her that she could escape the curse if she bought a house in California and never stopped adding onto it.
So Mrs. Winchester left Connecticut, bought a house, and began fifty years of construction. At one time, the house had over 300 rooms, staircases to nowhere, closets inside closets. Over 300 rooms, and she never invited anyone into any of them. She spoke only to one servant and her builder. She eluded death for fifty years. She also eluded life.
You can visit the Winchester House in Santa Clara. It is a monument to grief and fear and loneliness. The house is Mrs. Winchester, her ever-expanding pain, her ever-deepening sorrow. If only she had once opened the door and invited neighbors in for tea. If only she could have believed that she was not in pain alone.
The rabbi tells another story:
A woman came to see the rabbi because her strapping 20-year-old son was ill with a fatal blood disease. She didn't want to come, but the family thought she should speak to a rabbi, and she was too exhausted to put up a fight.
She shook his hand, looked him in the eye and told him point blank, "I'm an atheist. I was raised in a religious home, but I haven't been in a synagogue since I was a child. I don’t believe your hocus pocus can help me. There is no God in my world." All this before they even sit down.
They sit. She leans across his desk. "What I want to know," she says, "is why God is doing this to me? I'm a good person. I've lived a good life. I've done more than my fair share for the world." And she had. She had lived a very good life. "So, Rabbi, why is God punishing me?"
This poor woman suffers with her child. And she suffers again, because she believes that she's being punished by God and deserves what's happening to her. She can neither remember nor imagine what sin, what iniquity has brought all this about. But she knows that God has sent this illness because of her. The God she doesn't believe in.
But on some deep level she does. She has let go of everything that’s life-affirming about religion, but is holding on tight to a theology of punishment. Because even with all its dreadful implications, it protects her from an even more frightening prospect—that there is no meaning in this horror at all. Bad theology is still theology. It still addresses the question, even if its answers are flawed. These are the only answers she's got.
“God isn't out to get you,” he tells her. “We have bodies. They are subject to the laws of nature. That makes us terribly vulnerable to disease, to accident, to catastrophe. Vulnerability is the human condition. Your child is not sick because of something you did years ago. Your child is not sick because God is cruel. Your son is sick because of a transmission error in the genetic code.”
She looks at him with unbelieving eyes. "That's not what my rabbi said!"
She begins to cry now. No longer tears of rage, but of sadness and fear and love. "He's such a good boy," she says. And they both realize that for the first time they are finally talking about her son and his disease, not about her disappointment and rage. And it feels much better.
In the circle of those who love us, fragile and dying every day as all of us are, we discover the strength to overcome death. In holding tightly to what's eternal in this life, we locate a wholeness that overcomes brokenness. Healing opens a pathway to meaning and to peace. And even a person facing death may heal. Even the dying may find blessing.
We do not pray for a life without suffering. We pray with Jesus (who prayed this way too, the night before he died, in another Garden) for the heart to embrace life in the face of death, to remain loyal through it all to the compassionate God who knows that we are dust, who knows how we were made. We pray to be able to resist opting out of the pathos of our human condition through the demonic escape of power, domination, and glory. We pray to resist because it is only in our dust that God find us with healing, and we long to be found, we need to be healed.
We pray only for a circle of friends to accompany us. We pray only for wisdom to attach our lives to eternity. We pray only for deeper love, deeper compassion. That is enough for us who follow the Lenten Jesus through wilderness to the cross. Abundantly enough. Resurrection will surely come, new life will be given to us, paradise will be regained. But for now, we will be who we are, this and no more—and God will bless this courage. And God will give us healing peace, even now, just as we are.
An old midrash on the story of Adam and Eve goes like this:
After our first parents were banished from the Garden, they lived together, east of Eden, tilling the earth and raising children, struggling to stay alive. When their children were grown, they decided to go and see the rest of the world. In the course of their travels, they found the entrance to the Garden of Eden, still guarded by an angel with a flaming sword. They were frightened and began to flee, when God spoke to them:
"Children, you have lived in exile many years. Your exile is over now. Return to the Garden." The angel disappeared, and the way to the Garden opened.
Adam hesitated. He said, "It’s been so many years. Remind me, Lord God, what is it like in there?"
"There is no work,” God told him. “You won’t ever struggle or toil again. There is no pain, no suffering. There is no death!"
Adam listened. No work, no struggle, no pain, no death. He looked at Eve. She looked at him. They stood there for a long time in silence, partners who had struggled for so many years to make a life, to take bread from the earth, to raise children, to build a home. They thought of the tragedies they had overcome, the joys they cherished, the suffering they had endured, the love they had found.
Adam shook his head, "No,” he said to God. “Thank you. But not now. Not yet. Now we will go home."
Eve nodded her head. And so they continued their journey in the world.
And, with Jesus on his Lenten way of suffering, healing, and love, so do we.